Dead End

By Frank Rich

THE WARRIORS Directed by Walter Hill Screenplay by David Shaber and Walter Hill

The plot of this New York City gang movie is almost nonexistent, and what does exist is tedious. The large cast is wooden; the language is flat; the humor is childish, and the content would not engage the imagination of a lesser insect. Still, it is not so easy to consign The Warriors to the junk heap. Though The Warriors is trash, it is handsome trash. It excites the eyes even as it numbs the mind.

Director Walter Hill does not seem to know much about contemporary teenage hoods. The gangs in his film differ only slightly from the Dead End Kids of the '30s, the Jets of West Side Story, or even the Sweathogs of TV's Welcome Back, Kotter. With a little help from a concerned social worker, these misunderstood kids could probably be college timber. What Hill does understand is the steely textures of urban nightmares. From its opening image -a neon pink Coney Is land Ferris wheel against an inky sky -to its final burst of gore, The Warriors offers a hallucinatory vision of New York's deadliest nocturnal horrors. Hill creates creepy poetry out of menacing shadows, glinting switchblades, garish graffiti and charging subway trains. If enough people see this movie, it could sabotage single-handed the "I Love New York" advertising campaign.

Unfortunately, sheer visual zip is not enough to carry the film; it drags from one scuffle to the next. Deborah Van Valkenburgh, as the love interest of the Warriors' War Chief (Michael Beck), provides a few libidinous moments; a lesbian disco dance scene has its peculiar charms. But The Warriors is not lively enough to be cheap fun or thoughtful enough to be serious. Walter Hill, the talented director of Hard Times, the 1975 boxing movie, badly needs a direction to his career.

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